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Published in:
Introduction: China Shakes the World System Read chapter Read first chapter

2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Uneven and Combined Development and the Capitalist States System

Author : Steven Rolf

Published in: China’s Uneven and Combined Development

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter establishes the theoretical framework of the book. I explain how Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) can be mobilised in order to transcend the limitations of both globalising and methodologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. First, I demonstrate that while theorists of uneven development have demonstrated how the development of a global capitalist economy tends to reproduce (rather than undermine) geographic unevenness, they have failed to specify or problematise the role of states in this process. Consequently, uneven development fails to explain either why, or with what sociological effects, the states system persists under conditions of deep economic integration. State theorists, meanwhile, have point to the continuing role of states and politics in political economy while tending to exclude the world economy and the states system as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this reason, much state theory focuses overwhelmingly on the ‘internal’ politics of particular states. I close the chapter by explaining how UCD can provides a nonreductionist means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their distinctive and peculiar national mediations, and suggest how the insights of UCD can be mobilised to conduct social research.

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previous chapter Introduction: China Shakes the World System
next chapter From Varieties of Capitalism to Uneven and Combined Development: A New Perspective
Footnotes
1
This competition does not of necessity take military form. In fact, it is far more likely to take the form of tariffs, protectionism and the formation of regional trading blocs—which are best understood as part of a continuum of international relations (Davidson 2012).
 
2
Compare Marx’s more or less scattered remarks on taxation, with the 100+ pages each devoted to: the conversion of surplus value into industrial profit, merchant capital, interest bearing capital, and ground rent, respectively.
 
3
Pradella’s (2013) recent contention that Marx was here theorising a globally expansionary system and thus did to some extent aim to incorporate political mediations into his theory of accumulation in Capital—as, for instance, in the chapter on primitive accumulation—does not resolve the problem that he deliberately chose not to incorporate the competitive dynamic of multiple nation states into the scope of his analysis. As she notes (2013, 124), ‘in Volume I Marx does not take into account the relations in circulation and the multiplicity of nations’.
 
4
In a different context, Marx discusses how the rise of joint stock companies (a new form of firm organisation) alters the accumulation process by permitting a greater concentration of capital (Marx 1990, 310–311).
 
5
Jessop’s more recent work (2014) has moved away from a focus on national states and begun to explore questions of world economy and its relation with the states system.
 
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Metadata
Title
Uneven and Combined Development and the Capitalist States System
Author
Steven Rolf
Copyright Year
2021
Book
China’s Uneven and Combined Development

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-55558-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-55559-7

Copyright Year: 2021

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55559-7_2